Just How Bad Was Pandemic Strain on Emergency Wait Times? The Numbers Are In

October 4, 2022

(MedPage Today) – Patients were twice as likely to leave a U.S. hospital emergency department (ED) before seeing a doctor in 2021 compared with 2017 and spent an unsafe number of hours in hospital hallways awaiting a bed, researchers found. Drawing from numbers collected by voluntary benchmarking from an electronic health record vendor, the median number of patients who left a U.S. hospital without being seen rose to 2.1% (IQR 0.6%-4.6%) in 2021 compared to 1.1% (0.5%-2.5%) in 2017. (Read More)